The Boggart Sourcebook

Comprising three parts, this book is a companion volume to The Boggart: Folklore, History, Place-Names and Dialect. Part one, ‘Boggart Ephemera’, is a selection of about 40,000 words of nineteenth-century boggart writing (particularly material that is difficult to find in libraries). Part two presents a catalogue of ‘Boggart Names’ (place-names and personal names, totalling over 10,000 words). Finally, part three contains the entire ‘Boggart Census’ – a compendium of ground-breaking grassroots research. This census includes more than a thousand responses, totalling some 80,000 words, from older respondents in the north-west of England, to the question: ‘What is a boggart?’ The Boggart Sourcebook will be of interest to folklorists, historians and dialect scholars. It provides the three corpora on which the innovative monograph, The Boggart, is based.

Buddhist Devotion to the Russian Tsar : The Bicultural Environment of the Don Kalmyk Sangha and Russian Orthodox Church in the 1830s

Inoue Takehiko’s paper analyses how the close and long-lasting relationship between Kalmyk Buddhists and Don Cossacks (in the Don Cossack province) developed during the nineteenth century. This relationship was mediated both by Kalmyk Buddhist monks and the requirements of military and religious services to the Tsar, leading to transformations in the identity of this Kalmyk group. He uses the example of the ceremony surrounding the opening of a Kalmyk Parish school in 1839 to demonstrate how both parties sought to combine their socio-religious cultures in furtherance of the alliance of their interests.

Russian Archival Documents on the Revitalization of Buddhism Among the Kalmyks in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Baatr Kitinov’s paper uses Russian archival documents to examine the late nineteenth century revitalisation of Buddhism among the Russian Kalmyk population. He identifies three stages in this process: 1. 1860–1880, when Mongols wanted to “find” an incarnation of the Seventh Jebtsundamba Khutughtu among the Kalmyks (“Turgut”) in Russia or Olüts in Chinese Xinjiang; 2. 1880–1904, when the Dalai Lama was in Mongolia and Kalmyks traveled to Tibet; and 3. from 1904 to the first years of Soviet power, during which they maintained close contacts with the Dalai Lama. He also identifies three internal factors for the revitalization of Buddhism amongst the Kalmyks: 1. the revival of Tantrism in khurul practices; 2. the presence of Buddhists from other lands among Kalmyks; 3. and the Russian authorities permitting Kalmyks to visit the Dalai Lama in Urga.

Celebrating Heritage, Promoting Tourism, and Relocating Svāmī Vivekānanda: A Study of the Vivekananda Rock Memorial

Svāmī Vivekānanda’s (1863–1902) relationship with his guru Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa (ca. 1836–1886), and his role in the creation of the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission in the final decade of the nineteenth century, has attracted far more scholarly attention than the meanings invested in Vivekānanda after his death by devotees and admirers beyond the Math and Mission and by the various organizations that have disseminated these meanings. To redress this imbalance, this article examines the message embodied in, and projected by, the Vivekananda Rock Memorial at Kanniyakumari. It explores the Memorial’s contribution to Kanniyakumari’s expanding role as a tourist destination and the problematic nature of the story that has provided the rationale for the Memorial’s location. It shows how evolving versions of this story have fed the different understandings of Vivekānanda’s mission now institutionalized respectively in the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission and the Vivekananda Kendra, which manages the Memorial. It argues that the creation of the Memorial has directed attention away from Kolkata (Calcutta), the scene of Vivekānanda’s interaction with his guru Rāmakṛṣṇa, and thus away from that seminal relationship. The Memorial presents, instead, Vivekānanda’s experience at Kanniyakumari as the defining moment in his evolving mission as a “spiritual nationalist.” The article concludes by noting implications of this shift for the critical understanding of Vivekānanda, emphasizing the importance of the Rock Memorial’s function as an increasingly popular portal to “Vivekānanda of Kanniyakumari.”

Působení Jaroslava Bidla a Milady Paulové v pražské univerzitní extenzi

Like many other universities across Europe, the Czech Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague (later Charles University), too, since the end of the nineteenth century tried to reach wider strata of society using lectures intended for the broad public, so-called ‘extensions’. These activities importantly included several representatives of historical Slavic studies, especially Jaroslav Bidlo and his student Milada Paulová. This study focuses on the period during which Bidlo, in 1921–1931, served as president of the Prague committee for organising lectures for the broad public, the ‘Extension of Prague Universities’, while Paulová helped as a secretary of this institution (1921–1935).

The History of Russian Qur’аn Translations (19th Century — Middle 20th Century)

This article is devoted to the history of the tradition of translations of the Qur’an into Russian from the nineteenth century to the translation by I. Yu. Krachkovsky. The article examines the background to the creation of these translations, their key features and their importance for the development of the Russian tradition of translation and interpretation of the Qur’an. Particular attention is paid to the importance of studying these translations of the Qur’an into Russian in the context of the development of the Russian tradition of Qur’anic interpretation and the Russian school of Islamic studies. The purpose of this study is also to attract Russian and foreign Islamologists and Qur’anologists to a thorough study of the heritage of the Russian tradition of Qur’anic translation and to consider the prospects of its development in the twenty- fi rst century.